CSotD: Labor Day, if you can keep it
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For those of us in the gig economy, all a "holiday" means is that the post office is closed.
And most of today's strips either ignore the holiday, do some Dad-at-the-grill gags or — the largest percentage — focus on Back to School.
But David Fitzsimmons notes that Labor Day should be more than a final cookout, or, at least, it would be nice if the workers' weren't on the menu.
And while Fitzsimmons talks about the ongoing war against the workers, Joel Pett accents the victories that the bosses have already secured for themselves, and the utter hypocrisy of their empty salutes on this day.
The flaw in his cartoon being that hopeful last bit of the last panel, in which the workers turn their backs and walk away.
We wouldn't be where we are today if workers did not, as in Fitzsimmons' cartoon, willingly let themselves be treated as pieces of meat to be grilled and consumed.
Labor Day puts a particular bit of sand in my craw, because when I left freelancing and first went to work as a reporter in the late 80s, the night before Labor Day was the annual party, and, though I dismissed it as the "Corporate Prom," it was a pretty good dance, all right.
We had a good meal and an open bar and we met and mingled into the night, largely because there was no paper on Labor Day, it being a holiday, though, of course, the newsroom and press crew had to work the next day in order to have a paper the day after Labor Day.
It was hardly a surprise one year when the open bar ended and we got two tickets for drinks and then had to pay, but that seemed more an issue of liability than cost saving.
But it wasn't long before the whole thing was canceled and we began publishing on Labor Day and all the other holidays except Christmas, the reason being that the paper carriers wouldn't work on Christmas.
I wish the rest of us had had their spines, because it was a clear case of kindly Mr. Fezziwig giving way, bit by uncontested bit, to miserable Mr. Scrooge.
It's those little takebacks that are why we need unions and why unions get a reputation for being petty.
Yes, if a piece of paper falls off a latenight TV host's desk, it has to lay on the floor until the right union member picks it up and puts it back. If someone else does that, there will be a grievance filed.
Petty? The reason is that, if you don't grieve it, the next thing is that someone else puts it on the desk in the first place, along with the coffeecup and a pencil and the interview notes, and then sets up the guest chair and then we lay off the set dresser and a minimum wage lackey does the job.
The camel trying to wheedle his way into the tent always has a scab on his nose.
Labor Day, as a national holiday, began after the Pullman Strike, though the purported connection is disputed.
But it's not disputed that this was one nasty strike in which people died, Frederick Remington's illustration recalling a jibe from Britain that defined a bayonet as "a weapon with a British workingman on either end."
And a fact mentioned in that latter link came up in Nellie Bly's reporting, too: The 30 percent cut in wages at Pullman was not matched by a cut in rent at the company housing.
As she reported, workers were required to live in company housing or lose their jobs.
Which is why she famously wrote, after talking to the workers:
"I thought the inhabitants of the model town of Pullman hadn't a reason on earth to complain. With this belief I visited the town, intending in my articles to denounce the rioters as bloodthirsty strikers.
"Before I had been half a day in Pullman, I was the most bitter striker in the town."
But then who needs skilled workers?
Mike Lynch notes that the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette ran Beetle Bailey twice this Sunday and left Blondie out entirely. He asks how such a thing could happen.
It's easy: Chimps.
The days of literally, physically cutting and pasting, much less setting up lead print plates, are over: The person laying out the page has a Quark or InDesign template with pre-set windows and simply pulls in a .tif file from the syndicate's on-line bulletin board.
And even that is easier than it was a few years ago: Color comics came in two pieces, as seen in this panel cropped from yesterday's "Big Nate." The task at your end was to lay the two panels over each other precisely, which isn't difficult but takes a little dexterity and, more to the point, attention.
However, with greater download speed, there's little advantage anymore in breaking the huge, 600 dpi comics into two pieces, so you have your choice of downloading it in that two-part format or as one hi-res file.
You also have choices of whether you want the entire 3-deep piece with the "topper" as seen in the upper example, or just the lower piece, as seen in the second printing. You can also choose a format that lines up the topper and the rest in a two-panel deep, wider format.
It's apparent that whoever laid out the section properly grabbed Beetle with its topper for its rightful place on the first page, but later, when they got to Blondie's spot on the template, clicked on the wrong set of files that begin with "B" and got the right format/wrong title, which is why it still has Blondie's heading but shows a 2-deep Beetle.
And nobody noticed because it has become such an easy task that a chimp can do it, and, as the saying goes, "When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."
Now here's that other Richard Thompson
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